Technology has greatly changed the way we do things. We spend more time on the computer and spend more time doing business online. Today, we no longer need to travel to buy, since purchases can be made without stepping out of the house.
These days, when many businesses offer discounts or conduct promotions for Black Friday or the Christmas campaigns that we have very close to, many of us will consider making purchases online, a fact that will increase the number of purchases made on websites.
Although it is true, there is no 100% reliable formula that allows us to protect our device from an attack. Social media do not help protect our privacy, either. We are sharing more and more information about ourselves. Where we are, when we are on vacation, where we travel, what we eat, places most visited, etc. There is a lot of personal information that can be obtained through this channel. However, there are several techniques and formulae that can help us protect our devices and our privacy.
When browsing the internet, avoid clicking on any ads. Depending on which pages you enter, you may come across suspicious ads. Avoid browsing these pages and clicking on any link you do not think is entirely safe.
Keep antivirus programs updated on all devices on which you use the internet. It is for your safety! It will warn you whenever a file may contain dangerous content.
Search for online stores whose address starts with HTTPS and which have a padlock in the address bar. This ensures that the information being transmitted is encrypted.
Confirm that the page has quality seals, such as those of Online Trust or those of Visa and MasterCard. Pages with these seals are also, a priori, secure pages, because they are periodically subjected to reliability analyses.
Passwords: Make them complex! Avoid using very easy and simple passwords. Always use a different one for each device and for each channel you want to access. Remember that by always using the same password, you put all of your channels at risk.
Avoid giving personal data. Above all, avoid doing it through social networks or web pages with which you are not familiar. And never give out your credit card PIN. You can only be asked you your card number, the expiration date and the CVC, which are the three digits indicated in the last part.
Downloading pirated content may be a mistake. Many files downloaded without a licence can contain malicious programs. For this reason, we always advise you to enjoy legal and safe content.
The most common online payment methods are: PayPal, Bizum, Redsys, and Stripe.
These are just some of the many tips you could follow to prevent your devices from being attacked.
1. Malware:
Malware is malicious software that installs itself on the system, resulting in:
The purpose of all of these effects is to be able to obtain compromised information, violate computer connections, or create backup copies and publish them on the internet.
2. Phishing:
Impersonation is the way to appropriate sensitive data, usually through e-mails. Very often, being considered trusted sources, hackers use this method to capture data such as credit card numbers or passwords.
3. Man-in-the-middle attacks:
Man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks usually occur through a public or unprotected Wi-Fi network. Hackers can easily access your computer without you noticing and steal the information that you are sending over the internet.
In addition, once the device is under their control, they can install malware to steal protected information.
4. Denial of service attack:
In distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, several devices are compromised to spread attacks on the system so that they cannot finish processes and requests, hogging bandwidth and saturating the network, causing serious damage to the system.
5. SQL injection:
SQL injection attacks occur through web applications. Lines of malicious code are inserted in order to obtain private information from company servers.
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